EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced the next-generation EMC Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) platform. As an integral element of EMC's strategy to help customers align their IT infrastructures with their business based upon the changing value of information, the platform showcases a completely unified architecture that advances the world of enterprise content management. In addition, EMC introduced a wave of best-of-breed content management products that take full advantage of the underlying architecture and further solidify EMC's position as the world's leading provider of enterprise content management software and solutions. The new Documentum platform is the world's first major ECM offering based on a completely unified architecture, representing a significant innovation over today's more loosely integrated platforms and raising the bar on customers' expectations for an ECM platform. With this announcement, EMC is helping customers graduate from traditional content services that address the creation, management, delivery and archival of content. Now, these customers can implement a completely unified stack that includes process and repository services to provide increased functionality and flexibility in collaboration, automation and security. Customers can now improve their ability to derive the maximum value from their information, at the lowest cost and at every point in the information lifecycle. "Content management has reached an inflection point," said Dave DeWalt, Executive Vice President, EMC Software. "Customers across the globe have come to realize the functional and financial limitations of architectures that mask loosely integrated applications with a seemingly united single interface. They are asking for more. EMC has answered the call with an all-accessible, highly scalable infrastructure for unstructured information – a unified repository and set of services that is completely accessible by the masses of applications, desktops and systems that are spread across an enterprise. This capability makes possible entirely new levels of powerful content management." Building upon already unified technologies for the management of documents, XML files, rich media, web content and business process management, the new Documentum platform further unifies collaboration, federated search and retention management capabilities into one platform. While some ECM providers layer a user interface on top of a range of content management applications, the underlying architectures still comprise multiple code bases, security models, repositories, object models, APIs, etc. EMC Documentum enables all content management applications to share the same unified architecture with a common code base, security model, repository, object model and API. This new breadth of unification across the widest range of ECM technologies offers significantly simpler implementation, lower deployment and administration costs, superior performance and reliability, and better security and accountability with unified audit trails. Southern Company is a super-regional energy provider in the southeast United States and is one of the nation's largest producers of electricity. An existing Documentum ECM platform customer, the company sees particular value in a unified and comprehensive ECM platform. Holly Godfrey, Technical Consultant at Southern Company, said, "To better serve our four million customers, it is crucial that our geographically dispersed employees always have easy access to business-critical information such as database records, engineering drawings and maintenance data. Now, the unified platform will potentially give us a single point of access for all of our content and will further reduce inefficiencies associated with data search and retrieval." "As enterprise content management applications are becoming more strategic, buying requirements are shifting from point solution products to comprehensive platforms," said Toby Bell, Research Director at Gartner. "A unified stack that can federate formerly isolated content repositories offers irresistible benefits to business buyers. New functionality supports content-enabled vertical applications development, life cycle management, information access, collaborative processes and contextual presentation."